While many are seeing his run as the joke that just keeps giving up new punchlines, his run for presidential office should be taken deadly seriously for the tremendous danger it represents and the type of personality-cult strongman politics that lie behind it.

I think many Americans -- as well as onlookers internationally -- are simply assuming that, each time he goes "too far" in one outrageous statement or policy pronouncement after another, at some point he will come crashing down and that his run for the most powerful office in the world will finally come to an end.

"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?" asked Frederick Douglass of the crowd gathered at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, 1852. "I answer," he continued, "a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which lie is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham."

A U.S. man was sent to prison for collecting rain water on his own property.

Trust me, I took me a moment to figure out what was going on as well.

In my head, I had the stereotype that an American could do whatever they damn well wanted on their own property – including the right (in some parts) to shoot on site if you trespass. And no one can own the rain over their cold, wet hands.

This all went down in the town of Grey Point, Oregon, where the government had just decided that it now owns the water that falls from the sky.

Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists

by Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher

(Zero Books,

2015;

$29.95)

According to writers Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher, The Revolutionary Union (RU) and its later incarnation, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), were products of 1960s left-wing radicalism.

"Leaders emerged from the anti-HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)protests, the Free Speech Movement, the Peace and Freedom Party alliance with the Black Panthers, and the struggles in the final years of SDS, among other key events of the time," they write.

Ho hum. Yet another report showing that the CIA uses torture. This isn't news. It's a very old story, going back decades. And it's not just the CIA. Last week's Senate report was only one in a long line of exposes that have documented this quite routine American practice. When American officials were not themselves doing the torturing, they were training willing allies to do so. Often this training was quite formal, taking place in the U.S. Army School of the Americas, based in Fort Benning, Georgia. Torturing is as American as Wall Street, racism and the NRA. It's an intrinsic part of American exceptionalism.

After many months of pondering what U.S. President Barack Obama would do regarding the fate of this giant oily snake, and hundreds and hundreds of demonstrations by anti-pipeline activists, threats of blockades over Indigenous-held land, it turned out that the U.S. Senate was a stumbling block that stopped the pipeline.

On November 19, 2014, the Senate blocked the bill that would have seen the pipeline continue, just shy of one vote to pass at 59-41.